I will not hide it. I’m going to tell you and the world right now: I LOVE karaoke. I love being on stage, I love the sound of my voice over a mike, I love showing off the fact that I know the songs without looking at the lyrics screen, I love it when strangers come up to me afterwards and tell me what a great job I did. I LOVE karaoke.
I have tried a few places around town, but you always run into the same issue: you want to sing, but there are so many people in line that you barely get to sing 2 songs (usually just one). What a drag. If I wanted to sing one song I could sing it in the privacy of my home, in my car, or in the shower. When I go out to sing karaoke I want to be on stage for as long as possible.
One would think that the best place to do this would be a karaoke shop that has private rooms. I have tried these… the problem is that it is not the same as singing on a stage in front of a group of strangers. You see, my level of self-consciousness is greater the more people I know in the audience. So, is my only option to go to a crowded place and wait for my turn? Nope!
In comes the Limelight Stage & Studios in Boston (LimelightBoston.com/, 204 Tremont St, Boston). This place is a hidden jewel! It has multiple private rooms, which apparently is what people come here for. They also have a stage, which is mostly empty on Friday nights! By empty I mean NOT CROWDED. I went out with some coworkers last night, and I had the time of my life! I must have gone up at least 3 times by myself and 3 other times as duets. I went in at 7pm (when they opened) and left at 11pm and I was satisfied.
Also, don’t miss Zach, the Frank Sinatra singer. He is there every time I’ve gone, and he’s just a delight to listen to!
I’m afraid to even write this because I don’t want the place to get ruined by the mobs… but I just can’t wait to go back! This is easily one of my favorite things to do in town.
75 Chestnut 75chestnut.com(restaurant link is broken)
75 Chestnut St
Boston, MA 02108 (map)
Survey Says: A new tradition!
Right off of the Boston Common there is a tiny fashionable restaurant called 75 Chestnut, which tends to hold special events every so often. I remember going there with a friend a few years ago and enjoying back massages on the house. Unfortunately the massage caused me to lose consciousness and I spent the rest of the evening incontrollably (really, could not control it) crying. But anyways, this restaurant has a nifty little activity for families (or anyone, really) every holiday season: Gingebread housemaking.
Credit Card Meters!!! (#mindblown)Lucky for us, the city of Boston gives the gift of free parking to shoppers on Saturdays from Thanksgiving to Christmas. However, I must say that now that I know that there are CREDIT CARD meters in Boston, I would have not minded paying regardless of the rules! How fun!
Well, I took my family down for the second year in a row today, and it was absolutely wonderful. Both years I got the eggs benedict (you get to eat before you play with the gingerbread houses), and they did not disappoint. I probably should review this restaurant on the food menu, but I don’t have a full review. All I can say is that the raspberry stuffed french toast have been overdone every single year. What a way to ruin a classic.
As I was saying, the gingerbread making was wondeful. Take a look at some of our creations:
Original by: inaOne of my sisters-in-law actually gave up and didn’t finish a whole wall, so she got shamed by a waiter who walked up to our table to judge our final work! Burn!!!Other family members went ALL OUT (cheaters)This is the back of my house
Back of sister-in-law’s house
After brunch, we walked down to the Boston Common and watched the skaters at the Frog Pond. If there is one thing that is SO Boston that you have to do no matter what, is going to the Frog pond. We did not skate (look at that line!), but just being there was refreshing and got us into the holiday spirit like nothing else.
Frog Pond Ice SkatersMore skatersYou can see the Prudential and Hancock buildings in the background. Classic Boston.There was a spot on the floor with a sign that said “This is a good hug spot” — how romantic!This is a good HUG spot signLine to buy passes to ice skate.Rates for ice skating in the Frog PondThinking Frog by the Pond
I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season and find that one thing you get to do every single year. What a great time to start a new family tradition.
It is RARE when I rave about a restaurant (high standards, you know how it is), so perk up your ears (eyes?) because here’s one such occasion.
I came down to New Jersey (from Boston, where I live) to be there for my parents as they took the final step towards becoming American citizens. Now we are one big happy gringo family (thank you thank you, we are excited, too). Such a momentous occasion deserved a nice dinner celebration. And when I say “nice” I mean the kind of “nice” when people say “I’m going to take her to a nice restaurant.” Yeah, THAT kind of nice.
The Bonefish Grill was everything we hoped for and more. I must say that I was abit skeptical at first. I mean, this is a fish restaurant and I am mostly a meat lover. One look at the menu, and I thought “well, this will do, I guess.” The entire experience ended up being SO divine that I decided to not only rate my own dinner, but also my parents and grandmother’s dinner, the decor and the extra stuff (extra stuff? what could that be? keep reading!). Ready? Set. Go!
Décor: Romantic décorThe place looks like what a nice restaurant looks like. I’m sorry, I know I am overusing that word. Let’s find another one. Fancy? Elegant? Superb? Ooh, I like that one. The décor was superb. The lighting was dim, perfect for a romantic evening (or for any other evening that you wanted to make extra special). The elegant metal fish on the back wall almost made you forget that there was a whole section on the other side of the restaurant that had booths in it (the implication being that booths do not equal fancy, but it did not matter from where we were sitting).
Bread with pestoThe Bread
I’m not going to say this was the best bread I’ve ever had, but I can’t say it’s the worst (for a pretty bad review of bread, see my Rosie O’Grady’s review). It was actually on the “better” side. The pesto dip was definitely a unique twist on the popular appetizer (delicious, too!). I won’t rave, but it gets my thumbs up.
Rainbow TroutMom’s dish: Rainbow Trout $17.30 Sides: grilled asparagus, and vegetable of the day: spaghetti squash with honey and ginger glaze and a bit of brown sugar topping.
My mother’s assessment: “Can’t go wrong with trout… or asparagus!”
I tried it myself off her plate, and I thought it was a bit… “blocky.” It was quite dense, not very tender. This might be a quality of trout rather than Bonefish’s cooking, so I’ll leave that with you.
As for the vegetable of the day, every single one of us left it on our plates. I am a huge fan of sweetened squash, so I was surprised. It was just not as delicious as butternut squash with maple syrup, which I would consider to be spaghetti-squash-with-honey-and-ginger-glaze’s better-looking younger sister. Just didn’t compare.
Chilean Sea BassDad’s dish: Chilean Sea Bass 6oz $23.90 Sauce: Mango salsa | Sides: Veg medley | App: House Caesar
My father’s assessment: “I should have gone with a different sauce. This is good for trout, but not sea bass.”
I did get a chance to try the salad, and it was alright. Not bad, but not anything to write a blog post about.
Steak topped with Lobster ThermidorGrandma’s dish: (Special) Steak topped with Lobster Thermidor $16.90 Description from the website: “A passionate tale of forbidden love – so steamy, so indulgent, that it can only be expressed with a 6 oz wood-grilled sirloin and sweet lobster, lump crab, a velvety sauce with a hint of sherry, and garlic whipped potatoes. Or maybe it was a filet for +$6? Either way.”
My grandmother’s assessment: “the lobster was a joke, but good overall.” That’s translated from Spanish, so what she meant was that it wasn’t nearly enough. I guess she was expecting a whole lobster! She seemed to like it, though.
Sea Scallops and Shrimpina’s dish: Sea Scallops and Shrimp $17.30 Sauce: Lemon Butter | Sides: Garlic Whipped Potatoes and vegetable of the day
I am going to tell you right now: out of all the dishes in front of me that night, I did not envy anybody else’s choice over mine at ALL. I definitely got the best of them all. The shrimp was cooked to perfection. You know how frozen shrimp is chewy when you warm it up? Not so here! Perfect scallops, perfect shrimp, and I am VERY HAPPY to have gone with the lemon butter sauce. I was thinking of mango, but I’m glad I changed my mind. Come to think of it, if I ever went back to the Bonefish Grill, I would probably get the same thing.
Still, did not eat the spaghetti squash.
Warm chocolate brownieDessert: Warm chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream and raspberry sauce
You know how brownies are sometimes plagued by those pesky nuts? Well, not so here! The nuts were ON TOP of the brownie! Which means that I was able to enjoy every single bite. The brownie was warm, and it had a thing layer of chocolate topping (it was too soft to be frosting, but too hard to just be syrup). The entire thing was just amazing.
Opinionated CoasterThe “extra” stuff:
Can you believe this super duper fancy place had hashtags for you to share your experience on twitter??? Oh yeah, I was ALL over that.
“#bfgcoasters: if you this a Bonefish Grill Coaster, what would you say?” My tweet:
That was our unbelievable experience at the Bonefish Grill. And now, for the truly tacky finale, brought to you by the never-wasters, my mother and grandmother:
Rosie O’Grady’s rosieogradys.com
800 7th Avenue
(7th Ave & 52nd St)
New York, NY 10019 (map)
Survey Says: High price for ‘eh’ quality
ina in NYC 2013My parents, my grandmother, and I were in New York City for just enough time to visit a friend, have lunch and go back home to southern New Jersey (suburb of Philadelphia, where my folks live). As the foreigners/immigrants we are, it would have been a complete waste to have been in New York City without seeing Times Square. It would have been like… heck, there is no good analogy for this: it would have been like being in New York City and NOT seeing Times Square!
So, after much Google searching for restaurants near the iconic tourist location, we settled on a restaurant called Rosie O’Grady’s in the corner of 7th Avenue and 52nd Street.
Rosie’s is an irish pub that is up a level from a Molly Malone’s. This is the Target to Molly Malone’s Wal-mart. It has a full menu (including filet mignon), and a pub atmosphere. We had high hopes.
I ordered the filet mignon (I must confess my Google search centered around “steak”), while my parents ordered fish. Here’s the low down of our experience:
The bread was cold and stale (or at the very least you could tell it had been sitting out all day), and the butter was also cold.
The shrimp cocktail appetizer tasted exactly like the precooked frozen shrimp I buy at the store and then warm up at home. You can tell shrimp came from frozen because they are chewy, like octopus.
The filet mignon was undercooked despite my having ordered it medium, but I decided to overlook this considering I was having my steak.
The presentation left much to be desired. My meal was $30 for the steak alone, and I was expecting a presentation deserving of the extra cash.
The first limonade the waiter brought for me had a fruit fly floating in it (I would have said swimming, but I’m pretty sure the darn thing was dead)
Due to this incident, the waiter (Marco, from Ecuador, very nice) decided to spot us dessert. We got a free apple pie (which looked like it had been made last week) with ice cream. It did not hit the spot, I must say.
In the end, I don’t think I would go back. Normally I would just say this on principle alone, it is New York City after all and it deserves to be explored. But this time I must say my reasons are reduced to a simple word: “quality.”
Also, let me leave you with a bit of an anecdote. On our way out, I noticed that the hostess was having her lunch (or early dinner?) right by the main entrance. I figured if she wanted privacy she would have eaten all the way in the back (wrong assumption), and I decided to be rude and interrupt her meal (please note that I do know -NOW- that this is the WRONG thing to do to someone who probably has the crappiest job in the world). You see, the curiosity hit me when I saw her eating food from the restaurant, and I wanted to ask her what her favorite dish was. So I did (again, I’m SORRY).
She immediately got up, without looking at me, grabbed a menu, and pointed at the Lobster Ravioli. I smiled a lot and thanked her (and apologized) profusely, but she looked like she was trying to mask a level of annoyance never seen before. She never spoke a word. I immediately felt bad and had a thought: she probably gets bothered by foreigners/tourists ALL THE TIME. What can I say, the language barrier alone makes it difficult to communicate, let alone cultural differences. This woman was ON HER BREAK, and this stupidly culturally-inept person (with an accent, mind you) was interruption her break to ask her a completly inane question that did not matter at all because that person (me) had already decided never to come back to this restaurant again.
We thought Women’s Health Associates (173 Worcester St, Wellesley, MA) was the place for us, and then they did the unthinkable: they dropped us as clients based on ONE meeting, ONE question, and a lot of judgement from ONE midwife in the practice. We shared our story with family and friends and the outrage has been unanimous.
I have been chronicling our steps every week, so the following write-ups were written on that week.
Here’s our story:
Week 17 of Pregnancy
This week I had two “interview-like” pre-natal appointments scheduled: one with the Newton-Wellesley Hospital midwives, and one with the Cambridge Birthing Center midwives; however, after going to the former, I decided to cancel the latter. WHA is the midwifery group that services Newton-Wellesley Hospital. The midwife we saw was Midwife A. The practice has 3 midwives in total, which is great, because that means I’d only have to go through the trouble of meeting two other midwives in preparation for delivery (any one of them could be on call that day, so it helps to know all of them personally). Midwife A sat us down and started explaining their philosophy: most women come to them because they are interested in a drug-free delivery, and that is their specialty. She calculated that about 25% of women receive an epidural when under their care (making for a 75% success rate with natural deliveries, which was encouraging). She was very patient with all of our questions, which ranged anywhere from “can I eat liverwurst?” to “I want to stop taking pre-natal vitamins.” I told her that my biggest fear around hospitals was that because the epidural would be THERE, I’d be inclined to ask for it, even though that is NOT what I really want. I told her I really needed a strong support team around me to help me through this. She said that, although the epidural IS there and they will not deny it to anyone, they will probably take my request and ask me something like “well, why don’t we try this position for the next couple of contractions?” things like that, to try to keep me away from the drugs. That’s EXACTLY what I wanted to hear. Her response was very reassuring. She also explained that, because they don’t work directly at the hospital as staff, they are able to stay with you for most of the time you are in labor (this is different from other hospitals, where the midwives have multiple deliveries going on at once and might pop in once every couple of hours). She made us feel great and like this was the right place for us.
Week 25 of Pregnancy
We visited midwife #2 (of 3), Midwife C. I do have to say we got off on the wrong foot. First off, I wanted to have some time to discuss our birth plan, just like we had done with Midwife A on our first appointment, but Midwife C was in a rush saying we only had 20 min for our appointment and that there would be “plenty of time later.” This threw me off a bit, because I was expecting to have more time. So I just jumped to my first question: can I have a say on when the cord is cut? Her answer, No, they have their own policy to cut it once it stops pulsing. I asked her what if I wanted it to stay on for 15 min. She said No, because there is a risk of hemorrhage, to which I responded that that didn’t make any sense. When you cut the cord has NOTHING to do with when/how the placenta is delivered (which is what she was referring to with the bleeding risk). That’s the point when she got defensive and basically told us that they have their policies, and if we didn’t like them, then we should probably just have a home birth, and by the way, don’t even think of having all your pre-natal appointments here if you are going to end up having a home birth in the end, “we don’t do that.” At this point I was crying. I did not feel taken care of, and I wanted to just walk out and have a home birth. But Brian, with his completely leveled head, told her that our information is coming from Nancy Wainer, and she’s got to understand that we need her help to balance out the information we get from Nancy. To this, Midwife C responded that all midwives crinch at the mention of Nancy’s name, and they disagree with a lot of the things she does, and she’s surprised that she hasn’t convinced us to have a home birth yet.
At the end, Midwife C was trying her best to smile, and said she would do some research regarding the hospital policy about when to cut the cord, and that we should call her this weekend.
Week 26 of Pregnancy
Called Midwife C back. I had my script down: “I think we got off on the wrong foot, we really don’t want a home birth, we want to make this work, and we need your help to balance out the information we get from Nancy.” I was hoping she’d be more open, but she continued to go off on her rants. She even got to the point of explaining to ME why natural birth was better than not, and how their practice was the best “middle-point” between doctors and home births (ummm… hello, we already did the research, you’re preaching to the choir here). And she also added (repeatedly) that maybe a home birth would be best for us. I had to just cut through the unnecessary and useless fluff with a machete as if I was walking through the rain forest, tried to ignore her remarks, and I tried to focus on my questions: “please explain what you mean by ‘active management’ of ‘3rd stage’ delivery,” or “you mentioned jelly beans, are those regular store-bought jelly beans?” and other technical things like that. I stayed away from any other controversial questions, but she continued to lecture. She made her agenda very very clear, and I did not appreciate it one bit. Midwives are supposed to help you with YOUR agenda, not impose their own onto you. She was even saying some scary stuff about how I should not be selfish and I should put my baby first at all cost, etc (which is scary because that’s the kind of orthodox phrasing that doctors use to convince you to do C-sections). I know she’s against surgery, but her obvious strong opinions about every single topic and every single test was made very obvious, and I did not feel listened to, taken care of, or even taken into account in the process. She had said to come back in 4-6 weeks when we were in her office, and now she was saying I should make my appointment for 2 weeks from now. I asked her why the change, and she said they don’t usually see people who “are off doing their own thing” that often. So basically, regardless of what we were telling her, she had already written us off as “these people are not good for US” and sent me packing to not come back but in a month or so. I was furious at this. I made the decision right there that I might not have any say on who’s on call on the day of the delivery, but I do have a choice on whom to have my pre-natal appointments with, and I do not want to see Midwife C again.
Week 27 of Pregnancy
This week I reached a breaking point. You may recall my rant on this blog (called The Stress-free Natural Birth Paradox) last week where I expressed frustration at all the mixed information. I was depressed and I would cry without warning. My poor husband was at a loss. He didn’t know what to do to make me feel better. Our interaction with Midwife C was making me feel devastated, confused and unsupported.
Our next stop was to make an appointment with the 3rd and final midwife, Midwife B for our 28-week check and hope that appointment would go smoother. However, considering the amount of stress I had been feeling rooted on our last visit with Midwife C, we decided to make our next appointment with Midwife A instead. She’s the first midwife we met who made us feel so comfortable and supported.
And then we got this letter (click to enlarge)
Letter from Women’s Health Associates
They bumped us!!!!! All based on ONE meeting, ONE question, and a LOT of judgement on Midwife C’s part. We plan on reviewing them on the Better Business Bureau, Angie’s List, Yelp, and anywhere else where we can reach critical-thinkers who are looking for a supportive practice.
